Product Description

A man in a dream state begins to question whether waking or dreaming is the true reality; while on his journey in the dream he meets many interesting characters who talk with him about the meaning of life, perception and human existance.
Genre: Feature Film-Comedy
Rating: R
Release Date: 15-APR-2003
Media Type: DVD

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2037 in DVD
• Brand: WIGGINS,WILEY
• Released on: 2002-05-07
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Animated, Color, Dolby, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Subtitled in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 100 minutes

Amazon.com
Waking Life is a film that never settles down. Or maybe it never wakes up. Regardless, Richard Linklater's animated meditation seems to strike a perfect balance between the plotless meanderings of Slacker and the unquenchable knowledge-seeking of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. Any way you look at it, this is a weird, original movie.

As he attempts to figure out what separates dreams from reality, the protagonist (Dazed and Confused's Wiley Wiggins) hears an earful from everyone he stumbles upon. Ramblings range from the scholarly (Linklater's former college professor Robert C. Solomon gives a monologue) to the banal (of which there are plenty). Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Steven Soderbergh, and Adam Goldberg all get animated cameos, basically playing themselves. The dream-centered dialogues eventually grow mind-numbing, but that's OK; the animation steals the show. Each frame of the movie, which was first shot with live actors, was painted over, and the process renders a distorted and trippy collage of sights and sounds. Linklater's film is ultimately quite poignant, but, as with any good journey, you'll need to sit through some fairly tedious moments before reaching the destination. --Jason Verlinde

From The New Yorker
Like many revolutionary films, it has its longueurs, but Richard Linklater's first animated work, a painterly extension of reality, is astoundingly lovely and touching. He shot the material as a live-action feature and then turned the footage over to a team of animation artists, headed by Bob Sabiston, who enhanced and decorated each sequence. The resulting interplay between words and animation is both haunting and startlingly witty. What we see is an unformed young man (Wiley Wiggins) walking around Austin, Texas, where he encounters the coffeehouse Kierkegaards and ecstatically articulate bums who populated Linklater's initial triumph, "Slacker." (Most of the participants are local celebrities, not actors.) The young man thinks he's awake, but actually he's caught in an endless dream. Since the talk he hears is directed toward themes of reverie, apprehension, and death, we begin to wonder, after a while, if we are not witnessing his last moments of consciousness. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

What a trip!
This is possibly my favorite movie of all-time. The movie is about an adolescent kid who is stuck in a dream he keeps waking up from and navigates his way talking to various people each with deep philosophical outlooks on life. The entire movie was filmed with real people then animated over, which makes it unique. The animation alone makes this movie worth seeing and is going to make you feel like you're on drugs. In the words of a fellow college student "This movie will rape your perception of reality".

Indie Greatness
So the great Richard Linklater gave us Slacker and Dazed and Confused, but then he gave us this wonderful work of art.

I really am not going to say much about the film, but that is extremely fun and well-made, and for the price of the DVD, you almost have to check it out! It will get you thinking..

Original
My first thought was that it looked a bit like a university student's final project, and I don't mean that in a bad way.

I remember hearing a little of the buzz when this was new. Only a little, since I was living in Asia at the time. But live action was converted to animation through some process. That sounds like a gimmick, but in fact it's an ideal process for this particular story.

I don't know what I was expecting when we popped this into the player, since my lovely wife ordered it. But what I got was a lot of deep philosophical discussion of the sort that I thought about often as a student, and still do from time to time. Good brain food here, and a fine example that animation can do more than bring toys and superheroes to life.

So on the whole, I'm impressed. Later, I plan to enjoy the extra features and learn more about just how this was made. It's a very cool way to use technology, and at its heart it's still a story about people, and one that could've worked just as well without the animation process.